Luisa Valenzuela Critical Essay | Interview by Luisa Valenzuela with Evelyn Picon Garfield

SOURCE: An interview in Women's Voices from Latin America: Interviews with Six Contemporary Authors, Wayne State University Press, 1985, pp. 141-65.

In the following interview conducted in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1978, Valenzuela talks about literary and other influences, the relationship between semiotics and eroticism, the similarities of love and death, her approach to language and politics in her works, the question of gendered writing and themes, and the situation of contemporary Hispanic American women writers.

Luisa Valenzuela's narrative is revolutionary in two contradictory acceptations of the word: it reflects a violent break with tradition, future orientation, and change; and it evokes a time, cyclical in nature, like a planet revolving on its axis, a time in which myths are revealed and repeated. Valenzuela praises change and even consecrates herself to opening a breach in the complacent customs of the Western world. In doing this, she continues a modern...
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